I am back at JavaOne 2017 this year after a family break. The conference is taking place at Moscone West and Marriott Hotel in San Francisco.

Java EE 8 and the future of the enterprise platform

What is new in Java EE 8? There is the alignment with Java SE 8. The emphasis is on concurrency utilities and composability. JAX-RS 2.1 has reactive support as well as asynchronisation on both server and client. Java EE 8 also contains Servlet 4.0, which support HTTP 2.0. Also CDI 2.0 has extended for multi-thread events and improvements.

Microprofile 1.2 was also announced and there is strong community belief to accelerate the adoption of Java EE 8 through IBM, Red Hat, Tomitribe and Payara companies. Microprofile has now a Metric API for health check. Microprofile will be transitioning to the EE4J workload. It took about 8-9 months to move between Microprofile 1.0 and 1.1, because the project moved to the Eclipse Foundation.

The big news just before JavaOne, was Oracle’s decision to donate Java EE going forward to the Eclipse Foundation. The effort has a brand new project name EE4J, which is controversial. Mike Milinkovich has defended the position and appealed to the community not make a deal of the EE4J, because it will decided later. He stipulate the importance of setting up the process as the highest priority.

At the JavaOne keynote on Monday afternoon, executive announced that Java EE 8 will be completely open sourced. Oracle also intend to handover to Eclipse Foundation, the controversial and expensive pay-to-play Technology Compatibility Kits. This would be boon for smaller companies such as Tomitribe and Payara. It was also noted that Hitachi and Fujitsu are also looking into joining the EE4J organisation, because they have significant Java EE application server investments.

Dave Blevin thought that “the Microprofile would come under the EE4j banner, so that it works as the incubating innovation”. Currently, Microprofile is under the Technology top-level in Eclipse. Whereas EE4j is being established a new top-level project under the Eclipse Foundation. Oracle David Delabassée also stated, the community should realise that it is early days and the focus should be transitioning Java EE to the Eclipse Foundation. It is worth reading the The Eclipse Enterprise for Java Project Top Level Project Charter and forming your opinion on the new top-level project initiative.

Oracle competes head to head With AWS

At this JavaOne 2018, Oracle pushed out a self-healing, tuning, self-driving and autonomous relational database 18c. Larry Ellison has his guns aimed at Amazon’s Web Service Relational Data Store (RDS) and he also guarantees to new customers to cut their cloud hosting costs in half. That’s is quite a claim and challenge. With the OpenWorld keynote, it was clear now why Oracle took their eyes off Java EE 8 drivetrain in 2016, which leds to complaint’s in the Java EE community and spawn the protest group like the Java EE Guardians and Microprofile initiative. Obviously, Oracle directed their internal staff and focused on Oracle Cloud, the autonomous self-healing database and their own PaaS solutions. Oracle also have been busy in the acquisition and mergers department by buying start-ups like the popular Apiary.IO, which makes RESTful API design services and Wercker, the Dutch software development business, which provides continuous integration (CI) and continuation delivery solutions to the cloud hosting space.

One clear example of this laser-sharp focus, came with the surprise announcement of Project FN Java Function, which is Oracle’s serverless implementation and attempt to get onto the AWS Lambda market. The Project FN is also open source. I spoke to the lead developer, Travis Reeder(Github Profile), downstairs in the exchange exhibition. “Think about serverless as a more granular layer below micro-services. It is seamless and flawless integration into cloud machinery, you can think it as dynamic remote thread pool, if you want to.” You can read more about FN project and it’s project goals here.

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Huge endorsement of Kubernetes

During the keynote, Oracle announced that it had invested a lot of resources into the Kubernetes.IO project. So this was surprising endorsement, but also quite understandable. Kubernetes is particular well though cloud provisioning layer for microservices across a range of technologies.

Oracle brought out on stage James Governor of the analysis form Red Monk in order to draw a thick black line under the open source process. There is to be zero differences between the OpenJDK and the Oracle Java implementation from now on. I was taken back by this, because of the history of the encumbrances and the bittersweet fight to get OpenJFX out from Oracle’s house. But with the announcement, I have no choice, but to take Oracle at their word. Oracle announced the license for OpenJDK would be compatible with the GNU licence. I can only postulate that now that Jigsaw module is in place, in the future Oracle can still create proprietary module of their own. I draw your attention to the Apple open source Darwin operating system. The Cupertino corporate still own the keys to the entire enterprise, because they employ digital cryptographic signatures, asymmetric secure key registration
and sealed binary #1
when they release software to the public.

Apple open source, but

Apple only distributes new releases of Darwin, Mac OS X and iOS with digitally signed binary releases and authentication is baked into the update process. Therefore, only Apple can create new releases. The Java Runtime Environment on the other hand is not released with such restrictive cryptographic sealing and signatures.

And then in September 2018, Java 9 release 18.9 will expect to have a form of pattern matching that may or may not support deconstruction or object instance member into tupled properties. This falls under the guise of Project Amber. The JEP is number 305.

"Thank you so much for the training that you have provided for me and members of my team. You are a master of removing people from their comfort zone and enabling them to explore their potential. Those that have attended so far have thoroughly enjoyed the experience whilst leaving with a number of tools that will be invaluable in their work environment."Chris Forrest, Managing Director of UK Financial Services, Microsoft, UK